Russian Federal Council member, Armenia’s national hero Nikolay Rizhkov will arrive in Armenia in December, first deputy chairman of the committee of the State Duma for the CIS and European integration affairs Konstantin Zatulin told the reporters in Yerevan today.
He said Rizhkov will participate in the events dedicated to the 30th anniversary of disastrous earthquake in Armenia’s Spitak.
PanARMENIAN.Net – Belarus has sold weapons and military equipment worth about $500 million to Azerbaijan throughout 10 years, 42.TUT.BY reports citing unofficial data.
Part of the data on international transactions is available on the website of the UN Office for Disarmament Affairs.
In particular, Azerbaijan has purchased 150 units of T-72 tanks, 12 Pion self-propelled artillery installations, 120 units of D-30 howitzer, 12 SU-25 aircraft, 2 Buk missile systems, 2 Stiletto short-range air defence missile systems, 10 Polonez Multiple Launch Rocket Systems and more.
This is not the whole range of weapons that Belarus supplies to Azerbaijan, the publication says.
“Belarus has supplied 60 units of BTR-70 armored personnel carriers and an unknown number of Skif anti-tank systems,” it says.
“Also, Minsk has been assembling Belarusian military vehicles MAZ 6317 and MAZ 5317 military vehicles for Azerbaijan.”
German professional boxer of Armenian origin Noel Gevor (Norair Mikaeljan) lost to Former world champion, Latvian Mairis Briedis in the World Boxing Championship (WBSS) quarterfinal.
A 28-year-old Noel Gevor held his 25th fight and suffered a second defeat.
2% – that the Amulsar deposit should kspluatirovatsya from Armenian, not foreign companies. Thus, from the point of view of environmental risks, which, according to the project management, were completely neutralized through technology and the implementation of a number of preventive expensive environmental programs, more than 45% of respondents considered the operation of the Amulsar project to be quite acceptable provided some of these or other conditions were observed (technology, control and .d.)
Commenting at the request of ArmInfo, the results of the poll, project manager Hayk Aloyan noted that they consider them to be fully justified and correspond to the real picture of the public perception of the Amulsar project, in which risk management was originally built into an unquestionable imperative. “Over the years of project preparation, we have been confronted with a purposeful, specifically funded campaign against the implementation of our project. In Armenia, there is no other business project, so much money would have been invested in the misinformation and denigration of which, despite the years of information war against us and the mountains of black PR, the result of the survey shows that the population of the country, of course, under certain conditions , for example hard social and state monitoring, not against its implementation. Many understand that the suspension of the construction of the mine is the result of unprovoked actions of certain forces that deliberately disorient the public and manipulate public opinion, “said Hayk Aloyan. He noted that the public is well aware that the mining industry is an integral part of the industrial complex of Armenia and it should function on the availability of modern, neutralizing possible damage, technologies and continuous public monitoring, that is, the whole set of measures that, in principle, lay at the very core of the Amulsar project.
Recall that the Amulsar project is being implemented by Lydian Armenia, which is a subsidiary of the British Lydian International, whose shareholders are major international institutional investors from the United States, Great Britain, and a number of European countries, including EBRD. The Amulsar project is the largest industrial project in Armenia today for the development of the Amulsar gold deposit with a total value of $ 370 million. In August 2016, the project for the construction and development of the deposit was launched. Preparatory work has been going on since 2006. The life of the Amulsarsky deposit will be 10 years and 4 months, with an average of 200 thousand ounces of gold (about 10 million tons of ore) planned annually. The company is listed on the Toronto Stock Exchange. Amulsar deposit is the second largest reserves in Armenia.
Alexander Avanesov. The South Caucasus Railway Company, which is the concession manager of Armenia’s railways, assesses certain provisions of the draft resolution of the Government of Armenia “On the approval of the railway infrastructure development strategy” as not corresponding to the current realities.
SCR reports that in the process of preparing the document it was not agreed upon and was not discussed with the company that most fully possesses information in this restricted professional field. Judging by the text of the document, its authors do not have information regarding the real situation. As a result the draft includes provisions and assessments that do not reflect the current state of affairs and contradict individual points of the concession agreement on the basis of which SCR operates.
Assessing the current situation with the railway infrastructure, which is managed by SCR, the drafters of the document obviously took as a basis the realities of 2008, when the Company had just took over the management of the assets of the Armenian railway. The Decree of the Government of Armenia N1497-H of October 12, 2006, describes in detail, to put it mildly, the depressing situation in this area when the volume of deferred investments of the Armenian Railway was $ 112.5 million.
Meanwhile, since 2008, about 110 billion drams have been invested in the reconstruction and modernization of the railway infrastructure, the renewal of rolling stock and the formation of a modern machine-building complex on the basis of the Gyumri and Yerevan locomotive depots and the Gyumri wagon depot. 463 km of track and 40 bridges were also repaired. In addition, a program has been launched to upgrade the suburban passenger train, which will be fully implemented in the 2020s. A new modern electric train has been launched, which runs in the Yerevan-Gyumri route. At the same time, a comprehensive investment program for rolling stock fleet renewal is being worked out.
As a result, over the 10 years of SCR activity, the number of transport accidents (security status indicator) on the railway decreased 6-fold, the failures of technical means of power supply – 4-fold, the failures of technical means of railway automatics – 10-fold. The average train speed increased from 25 km / h to 60 km / h (in some cases up to 100 km / h), 8 large station complexes were modernized, labor productivity increased by 46%, new technologies were introduced in Armenia. The complex of these measures led to a multiple decrease in emergency events. Thus, if in the first year of SCR operation, in 2008, 151 coming- offs of organized trains (including 4 passenger trains) were recorded on the railway, then in 2017 there was 1 case, and that was not the fault of the SCR employees.
SCR Company, as a company responsible for the development of the strategic railway sector of Armenia, will continue to fulfill its obligations to the state in full scale and is ready to cooperate with all the stakeholders. CJSC “South Caucasus Railway” is a 100% subsidiary of OJSC “Russian Railways” and carries out concession management of Armenian railways. The railway infrastructure of Armenia was transferred to the concession management of SCR CJSC according to the Concession Agreement signed on February 13, 2008. The term of the concession management is 30 years with the right of prolongation for another 10 years.
Special Investigative Service (SIS) director Sasun Khachatryan refused to comment or give any information about an unnamed lawmaker who Nikol Pashinyan said is under a criminal investigation in the most massive bribery case in the history of the Republic of Armenia.
Reporters asked Khachatryan today after the Cabinet meeting to identify the lawmaker.
“No comment”, he replied.
YEREVAN, OCTOBER 27, ARMENPRESS. A concert dedicated to Charles Aznavour, the legendary French-Armenian crooner who died on October 1 at the age of 94, will take place 19:30 October 29 and October 30 at the Yerevan Opera Theater. The concert is titled For You, Aznavour.
Armenian singers and musicians will perform Aznavour’s songs, the culture ministry told ARMENPRESS.
Jérémie Delvert from the French military choir will be the concert’s guest performer.
Delvert was part of the French Guard of Honor at the state funeral of Aznavour in Paris. He performed the Armenian Waltz song in Armenian during the funeral.
Edited and translated by Stepan Kocharyan
The relatives of people who are serving life sentence gathered in front of the NA building demanding amnesty for convicts.
Former convict Vahagn Chakhalyan says many of those sentenced to life imprisonment have been punished only on the basis of self-confession or only one person’s testimony.
The protesters submitted a four-point proposal to include them in the bill of amnesty.
In the Armenian reality an alarming situation has emerged around civil society. The latter is considered to be a relatively independent institution from political system. There is no exaggeration to say that this system, which is considered to be one of the more or less well-developed institutions, in now on the brink of extinction, at least in the sense that it has become a surrogate and serves interests diametrically opposite to its main goals.
For decades a considerable part of civil society organizations as well as expert and journalistic community getting financial support from Western organizations for the sake of fostering democracy, has been deviated from the realization of their main mission and inadvertently has become a party to the conflict present in the current political situation. And now they quite often act as government lawyers and as government accusers of those who criticize the current government.
Moreover, the blatant anti-democratic developments in the country’s socio-political life not only meet the disdain aforementioned segment, but also through their efforts the topics unwanted by the government are simply silenced.
There are a number of examples: the issue of Amulsar mine exploitation, which still remains insoluble by the government, highly disturbing facts present in the content of the conversation bugged between the heads of National Security Service of Armenia and Special Investigation Service of Armenia, the apparent terror of freedom of _expression_ on social media and outside of it, the obvious selective attitude within the judiciary, the country’s deteriorating economy, the willingness of the government to send RA Armed Forces personnel to Syria just to please the Russian Federation, and, finally, the recent developments around the NK conflict, which reached the most dangerous point ever witnessed throughout the negotiation process.
The above-mentioned issues has been manipulated by this very same group, which prior aim must have been, in fact, to detect and present all these issues to the public in time. Let us go into details issue by issue: it’s approximately 2 decades since many Western organizations have been continuously funding particular organization in the Republic of Armenia for protection of human rights. These funding sources are available to the public and the amount of the money allocated is more than sufficient to ensure proper response to human rights violations in the country.
Until the recent change of government these institutions responded promptly even to the slightest issues, but after the change of power their functions seem to have diametrically changed.
Aftermath the change of government vast majority of prominent representatives of the non-governmental organizations funded by Western grants, have in this or that way become involved in the government system (some have become involved in the SNCOs, some in the executive branch, some participated in Yerevan municipal elections becoming aldermen representing the ruling political force, names of the many will probably be found in the upcoming National Assembly snap election list representing the ruling political force) thus they have become governmental non-governmental organizations (GONGOs), meanwhile, these people continue to get financial support as non-governmental organizations, and, consequently, are obliged to respond to obvious violations of human rights, particularly, freedom of _expression_.
24 hours a day hate speech campaigns are run on Facebook by different fake accounts against those people, web-sites and organizations who speak out of the shortcomings of the current government. But those who are fed by Western grants in order to promote democracy in the Republic of Armenia, instead of responding to the hate speech attacks organized by thousands of fake accounts, are busy with looking for “lies” in the words of the government critics.
About a specific case: a couple of days ago a group of people in Maralik attacked the group of strongest critics of the government. None of those human rights defender organizations made a statement on this case, some of these human rights defenders even encouraged on social media what happened in Maralik.
The same worrisome situation is among the Western private and state-funded media outlets. It is important to note that Western foundations spend money on media in our country for we are considered to be a country with partly free media and these funds should be directed to creating alternative platforms to government propaganda.
Moreover, while assessing international freedom indexes, often some formal indicators are taken into account such as the amount of money funded to fight for freedoms and allocating money to experienced partners over the years. Now the donors do not even see that these funds are used for diametrically opposite purposes than it has been declared before.
After May 2018 all the Western-funded media have become government propaganda satellites. For instance, the most well-known Western country budget-funded media outlet has invested all of its media resources into promoting government propaganda.
It is already 2 months since the local authorities activities in Maralik have simply been paralyzed by a group of people, the rights of Amulsar mine employees have been violated and they cannot go to work, dissidents are attacked in Maralik, meanwhile the police remains indifferent to that, and media financed by the Western money for the sake of the prospect of creating free media, either totally ignore all these issues or send their crews to cover the people who act under direct patronage of the government.
There is also an interesting fact in the context of media freedom. The thing is that all those media groups that have never been funded by the Western organizations are relatively neutral in the media recently.
Rather disturbing signals are received by the expert community and in this case the consequences are likely to be more than dangerous. The experts once strongly criticizing the government have turned into “revolutionary figures”. One of them writes a book praising “revolution”, the other “justifies” the participation of Armenian troops in Syria in this or that way, another tries to explain, to put it mildly, the worrisome plight of the Armenian positions in the NK negotiation process, the next one tries to justify the deterioration of the country’s economy.
These people think that the society has forgotten how diligently they interfered in the foreign and domestic political developments over the past years and do not realize that their current “revolutionary” posture is a much bigger threat to Armenia’s security.
In Nakhichevan, the opponent is improving its positions, the Armenian positions in the NK peace process are weakening, and the leaders of the Minsk Group co-chairing countries one after another make statements outlining that the final settlement of the NK conflict is near, but the representatives of our expert community are bypassing these issues and try to silence the discourse around it by all possible means.
The shameless fact of having a military presence in Syria in order to please the Russian Federation by the current government is being attempted to present as mildly as possible by the expert community. And those who remain true to the expert impartiality and do not turn into “revolutionary” will be faced with harassment in social media by several thousands of fake accounts, which users, most likely, receive salaries at the expense of RA taxpayers.
Such a perversion of civil society should be of concern to all of us, not just to its donors as civil society is an important part of the country’s democratic structure. Meanwhile, this path is depriving Armenia of democracy and if until now we had only put the blame on the previous government, now the current government is companioned by the civil society representatives funded by the Western foundations as well as media outlets and the vast majority of expert community funded by the same source.
Narek Samsonyan
Authorities have launched a criminal investigation into an attempted murder in Vanadzor, Lori province.
According to the Investigative Committee, the local hospital contacted police at 19:00, October 11, notifying that three people have been admitted with gunshot wounds.
Police said the incident is an attempted murder.
An unidentified gunman opened gunfire outside a Vanadzor restaurant with the intention to murder his target. Police did not specify whether all three victims were targeted, or if only one was the initial target and the others were wounded collaterally. The shooting happened at 18:00, October 11.
Police said it was a drive-by shooting.
Later on the same day, the same car was found set ablaze in Vanadzor. 30 bullet cases were found inside.
Police have questioned around 20 people in connection with the shooting.
A manhunt is underway to apprehend the shooter.